Dear Blinkist, Your ads pop up in my social media to let me know that you make it possible for people to get key insights from nonfiction books and podcasts in 15 minutes or less, and that you will curate their reading based on…their reading. No more serendipitous discoveries. No more sitting down to plow through a long or even short book. No more wasting time on an entire podcast. You’re the one-night stand of reading rather than the marriage. In just 15 minutes your users can glean enough highlights to bullshit their way through a date or a dinner party (if there were such things these days) or Zoom meetup, to give the impression of erudition without the effort. The inescapable conclusion is that everything else in the book is just filler. Good to know if you’re a writer. I admit that in Twitter Times, my brain balks at hard work. It has grown to love tiny paragraphs, but I know that’s just my brain wanting sugar. And if I give it sugar, it will ignore complex carbohydrates and demand more sugar. It won’t want to do a deep dive into cults or the Constitution or the internet of fungi that helps plants communicate with each other. Too hard! Too much time! But Blinkist, I need the long read, the hard read, the read that pokes my sluggish brain, now more than ever. When our own leaders seem to think and talk in sound bites, I crave more than factinis for cocktail parties. I need books written by polymaths, not recommended by algorithms. So, Blinkist, my brain and I will continue to slouch on the couch for hours, slowly making our way through a challenging book over days, maybe underlining and putting an exclamation mark in the margin (yes, I write in my books!), putting it down for a while to think about it, and then returning for another go later. Just trying to be a thinkist, one complete book at a time. XOXO Nikki
